Uncle Pete I assume that an 80 cap car is a car with a load capicty of 80,000 lbs??? What type of cars were these, ie boxcars, outsided braced, etc???? Thanks for any info you can provide Tony LaLumia
Some of the 80 caps were all wood, some were steel sheathed, but they were small box cars. The Mop also had a bunch of them including the ones painted in a sort of "Eagle" scheme.
I remember being in the Fredonia depot before time to go to work and a local Farmer came in and was talking to the Mop agent, Homer, and was wanting to ship some cattle. Homer got busy and ordered some empty stock cars that had to come from Abilene, Texas. 6 empties came in, and the farmer only loaded one. I had a total of 44 years of various railroads, and this was the only car of cattle I ever handled.
So Sad to hear, I remember when I first hired on with the SK&O I used to run the old FRISCO Main from Neodesha to FREDONIA and me and Jeff Mayberry and Jeff Van Buren, as well as Bruce Herter switched La Farge as well as ADM, and picked up cars from Winfield and Wichita to take back to head on to either Pittsburg, Chanute, Cherryvale, or Coffeyville, and sometimes Owasso. Lots of Great Memories!!!
I worked the MoPac Fredonia TSE a handful of times in late 1978 and early 1979. At that time the job went to work at Durand, KS. We seldom, if ever, handled more than 15 or 20 cars to and from Fredonia. I don't remember handling much cement, but I do remember going to the soybean facility. That was as close as I ever got to the Frisco/ATSF crossing. We usually stayed pretty close to the MP depot. Does anyone on this forum know the history of all three railroads in Fredonia? I find it interesting that the MP line was pulled up through this town, but they kept a presence using trackage rights. Does anyone have a map that shows the location of the old MP line?
In 1962, business on the Mop at Fredonia was booming. We had to store soybean cars (40 foot boxcars) on the alfalfa spur and the elevator tracks out North of downtown. On the old branchline South of the Frisco main, we stored a lot of soybean cars (in fact, too many to be pulled out by our SW1.) The cement came from the local plant which was worked by the Frisco, and the 2 railroads interchanged a little bit South of the ADM plant. We interchanged with the Mop main line at Roper. After I left there, I understood that the Mop used trackage rights to get to Benedict on the Santa Fe for interchange to the Mop mainline.
Thanks for posting the maps, Cody. That helps tremendously. Ronald, I appreciate your insights as well. I wish that I had known more about the area when I worked there. It's difficult to put it all together after 30-plus years.
